Tag Archives: Kids

Proud

11 Dec

candle

It was already dark when Amy and Heath got home.  I had told Hallie we were going for a walk and she already had her shoes on, having struggled into her pink velvet boots, which weren’t the shoes I would have picked, but in Hallie’s world they worked.

When Heath got home, he was excited.  We had told him about the shopkeeper down the street who had been beaten a few days ago by a man shouting “I kill Muslims.”  The Giving Tree, our local yoga studio, had organized a meditation for peace, and we thought we should stop by.

On our way, Amy and I went over the meaning of meditation, leaning heavily on the fact that it would be quiet, and we should do our best to keep it that way.  Heath continued walking, happily bopping along, seemingly oblivious to all I had just said.

“Heath.  Heath.”

“What?”

“Did you hear what I just said?”

“Yeah.”

“What did I say.”

“We have to be quiet.  I got it, I got it.”

The crowd was small, forming a circle on the corner in front of the store.  Seven or eight people sat on the sidewalk meditating.  A few dozen others stood around quietly, some holding candles. Hallie was up on my shoulders and I rocked slowly from side to side as she took it all in.  Occasionally she would say, “Wow.”  One of the women on the ground smiled.

For about two minutes it was really nice.  Then Hallie wanted down.  So I ran her around a bit off to the side, where we wouldn’t disturb anyone, and we quietly took the kids inside for a treat.  Cookies, chips and crackers were gathered, and as we were digging around for our money, Heath stepped to the counter and said, “I’m sorry for what happened to you guys.  I hope you’re OK.”

The shopkeeper looked at Heath for a moment, then touched his heart, assured him they were OK, put his palms together and bowed.

Heath then said he couldn’t believe anyone would do something so horrible and started into a rant about the generally shoddy condition of humanity, which confused the man, and Amy had to step in.  But for a moment there, he had really nailed it.

Walking home, I told him I was proud.

“Why?”

“Because you spoke eloquently, and you spoke from the heart.”

He thought about that for a moment, and then said “Oh.  OK,”  before moving on, heading towards home, seemingly oblivious to all I had just said.

 

DSC_0134 (2)

Love Fatima Food Mart

Astoria Gathers to Support Fatima Owner After Anti-Muslim Attack

The Giving Tree

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Big Magic

22 Sep

Central Park

Falling in love is small magic, a beginners sleight of hand.  With a little time and patience anyone can do it.  Marriage is something more:  A time-release miracle, performed in tandem, naked on a high-wire. Friends and relatives offer a toast as you climb the ladder, and then go their way, leaving the two of you to walk out alone, exposed, your lives in each others’ hands.  And while this is very brave, it’s not yet miraculous,  for alchemy takes time.

Saturday began early, crisp and cool, as we made our preparations for the Buddy Walk, the yearly Central Park gathering of the nicest families I know, and the day we join with friends to celebrate Hallie.  Heath hates this, of course.  He has to leave the house, spend hours outdoors, walk great distances, socialize in a loud communal atmosphere with limited technology, and all because of his little sister.  “Why God?!”  he cries, his hands aloft like a latter-day Tevye, “Why must there be so  much walking?  Why must there even be a Buddy Walk!?” And then he does his best to close out the world, burrowing beneath a sweatshirt, and desperately trying to find something, anything, to do on his tablet.  For Heath, we call this being a good sport.

As we move through the day, the clouds come and go.  Far more social than I, Amy is in constant motion.  She greets, she organizes, she chats.  I hang with Hallie as she gets her nails done (tasteful pink) and her hands painted (“Star,” she says, pointing solemnly to her left hand; “Heart,” she says, pointing to her right.).  Spending the day within a few feet of each other, we barely speak, and as the afternoon winds down, and our friends disperse with hugs and thanks, we make our way home to prepare for her brother Tim’s annual cook out.  More food, more wine, more friends.  A day of love, friendship, good food, and a little too much wine.

Sunday is our anniversary.  No gifts, no dinner, no expectations.  We can barely get off the couch.

Eighteen years ago I knew little of magic.  I just thought I was lucky.  I had met this sweet, funny, beautiful woman, for whom I felt a love stronger than any I’d ever known.  I offered my hand, she took it, and together we climbed the ladder and stepped out onto the wire.

The wonder of a good marriage is that there is no illusion.  It is very, very real.  And very pure, for it’s a miracle you create solely for yourselves, using only what you’ve learned from each other.  A mutual act of strength, humor, joy and grace, performed fully cognizant of how many times you’ve kept each other from falling.  And it’s so much fun.  To this day, nobody makes me laugh like she does.  And the magic just grows with each passing year.

I’ve always had trouble seeing myself.  There are moments of clarity, but most of the time I struggle.  Perceptive with others; I am, to myself, an amiable blur.  But for eighteen years Amy has been my mirror, unrelentingly showing me my best self.  A simple gift of incredible value.  And the biggest magic I know.

 

Amy

 

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Alone Again (Naturally)

11 Jul

alone-again

Cigarettes and beer on a warm summer breeze. 

To this day, walking the streets of New York, I’ll turn a corner and bam!  There it will be: that essence of summer 1972.  And I have to stop, because, for a moment, I am nine years old, sitting on the porch of our Lake Michigan cottage, holding my little Sears & Roebuck 9 volt transistor radio, listening to Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again, Naturally.”

It’s an odd song for a kid to fall in love with.  A father dies, a mother dies, a young man’s abandoned at the altar.  I believe suicide may be contemplated.  But none of this really matters.  Because it’s not the words so much as the gently loping beat, like the saunter of a sun-kissed girl walking along the sand, a melody with the quiet insistence of waves on a shore,  and that distinctly English melancholy of something beautiful coming to an end.

Cigarettes and beer.

It was a crazy summer.  My cousin Joni, sixteen and wild, had run away to California, only to turn up several weeks later, with a copy of Joni Mitchell’s Blue tucked beneath her newly unshaven armpits.  She would play “California” and then solemnly intone to whoever would listen, “It was just like that.”  She was so cool.

But even cooler was her friend Memphis.

First of all she was from Memphis.  Second of all she would take driftwood  and turn it into art, painting it with a big letter “M”, and clouds, and seagulls and stuff.

But mostly, she would talk to me.

We’d sit on the porch as the sun went down and the beachgoers across the street packed up for the day, and in her exotic southern accent she’d tell me stories.  Like how her sister had been home sick one time when she heard that her boyfriend, whose Camaro Z28 was the baddest car in all of Memphis, was stepping out on her.  How her sister had pulled on her bathrobe, tied a scarf over her rollers, and headed out in search of that Z28, and how, finding it parked outside a local burger joint, she had stopped the car, walked inside, and dropped her boyfriend’s date with a single punch.

And we would talk about girls.  She tried to get me to believe that the prettiest weren’t always the nicest, and that I should always give the less attractive girls a chance.  I didn’t really believe her, but I lied and told her that I had a crush on a girl who wasn’t very pretty at all.  She smiled.

And as the night settled in, and the rangers locked the gates and began their patrols, we watched the spotlight on their pickup sweep across the darkness, while the adults inside the cottage gathered around the big table, talking and laughing, playing cards.  The breeze lifted the hair from Memphis’ face and I stole a glance as she looked out across the water.  It was 80 miles to Milwaukee.  Too far to see.

 

Heath came to me last night as we were getting ready for bed.  Having mistakenly tried to eat ice cream from a frozen scoop, I am holding a bloody washcloth to my lips.

“Dad, can we go out on the porch and talk for a while?”  There’s an urgency in his face.  He’s afraid I’ll say no.

“Sure.” I mumble, getting some ice for my lip, which is beginning to swell.  “Go on out on the porch.  I’ll be right there.”

The fireflies have finally arrived, and as I join him they glimmer up and down the block.

“There’s one!” he shouts, jumping up and following it around the porch.  Fascinated by this little piece of light, he is every inch the nine-year old.  But soon he will be ten.  He borrowed my sandals for the first time this week.  Still puppyish, he is growing into his feet.

We talk about his first day at summer school, his new teacher, his friends.  When things go quiet he pushes for more.

“Is there anything else you want to tell me or anything you think I should know?”

Struggling to maintain the conversation, he leans on the professorial cadences he finds so comfortable.

“Dad.  Is there anything else you want to tell me or anything you think I should know?”

I laugh, because of course there’s too much.  And then, gently, I say “You know Heath, we don’t always have to talk.  We can just sit together and enjoy the evening.”

“I know, but I like to talk.”

So we do.

 

In a few weeks we will return to Lake Michigan, and a town that is in many ways unchanged.  But it won’t smell the same.  Most of my family are gone now, and sadly, they took their packets of Kools and their Pabst Blue Ribbon with them.

But, for my kids, there are two houses, a grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins galore, as well as porches, sunsets and the breeze off the water.

I heard years ago that Memphis had become a nurse.  I’m not sure where.  But I like to think she’s still out there, telling stories, painting driftwood, and giving sage advice to precocious lovelorn little boys.

Her hair was auburn.  She was sixteen.  I think of her every time I hear that song.

 

ghaven1

 

 

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Rivers and Streams

6 Jun

 Waitresses

Britta Seaton, née Slaughterback, was born in 1888.  She lived in a little house in Lawrenceville, Illinois with a Mynah bird that could talk.  A small man with an outsize temper, her husband was both an alcoholic and a member of the Ku Klux Klan.  Her life could not have been easy.

Rebecca Bell came from Wales at the turn of the last century, building a life in a new country and raising a pack of boys in the process, one of whom married Merle Ball of Brazil, Indiana, turning her, as she always liked to say, from a Ball to a Bell.

Merle’s father was a section boss on the Indiana railroad.  He had beautiful handwriting, and he drank too much.  She left home at fifteen, taking with her a strain of bitterness that would run through the rest of her life.  The anger in her voice was undiminished as she described, eighty years on, standing in the cold outside the local tavern, waiting for her father, as man after man stepped outside to relieve himself in the snow.  She outlived her husband, she outlived her children, and as things unraveled she lost much of herself.  But she never lost that memory.

Gladys Seaton, daughter of Britta, also fled a drunken father, only to flee again from the abusive uncle who had taken her in.  The eventual mother to six daughters, she ran a string of diners and coffee shops.  She smoked like a chimney and drank coffee in much the same manner.  Born in 1909, she wrote a letter to her children and grandchildren on the night of the first moon landing in which she marveled at all she had seen.  Outgoing and vivacious, she never let the truth get in the way of a good story.  And in the end, even death couldn’t stop her.  A great believer in the afterlife, for a year or so after her passing she would occasionally appear as a shadow, a scent, or a bit of mischief-making, whether checking on her grand-babies, or teasing and terrifying the daughters she had left behind.

One of whom was Barbara “Bobby” Stressman.  A beautiful, playful woman, she started dating my father when she was fifteen, lost him when she was thirty-eight, and was left to raise four children alone.  She remarried, taking in her mother-in-law, Merle Bell, as well as her second husband’s grandson.  Her children grown, she continues to care for others.  It seems to be her mission.  She told me once that as a very young girl she was taken by friends to a revival meeting downtown, where, with a certainty belying her age, she walked down the aisle and accepted Jesus as her savior.  I’d never heard  that story before, but when I see her now, volunteering at the hospital, or caring for a dying friend, I can’t help but see that same little girl, all by herself, taking the first steps on a journey that would last a lifetime.

From these women came my daughter, who tomorrow turns six.

They are, of course, but one tributary, for flowing north out of Oklahoma and Texas comes another just as beautiful, and certainly just as strong.  But this is the stream I know, for it also flows through me.  And on this day it is good to remember that despite all the obstacles that have stood in its way, it continues to rise anew, cold and clean, bubbling forth in the early morning light.

 

hallie attitude

 

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An Actress of Uncommon Stature

15 Nov

medea_diana_rigg_programme_lo_res

The performance begins without prelude.

Quietly at first, as we await our breakfast, Hallie catches sight of herself in the mirror and begins to chatter, rapidly but softly, with an intense staccato that slowly builds as, with virtuosic restraint, she works her way, rung by rung, up to the emotional highwire where, finally, she releases all in a swooning crescendo, her arm sweeping the sky as she falls away in a blood curdling “Noooooooooooo!”  A brief pause follows, and then she strains against the straps of her booster chair to check her reflection. Pleased with the effect, and the attention she has drawn, she drops back into her seat, spent from the culminating moments of her five-year old Medea.

But wait! Gathering her energies, she takes a breath and begins again. Initially terse, she launches into a finely wrought internal monologue, a soliloquy of intent.   Passionate, yet controlled, my daughter is rapidly developing into an actress of uncommon stature, her brilliance taking us all by surprise. Certainly, genetics has played a role, but she is now far beyond any gifts inherited from Amy and I, and her talent is all her own.  As a result, in some instinctive fashion, she has gone back, far beyond the modern canon, beyond even Shakespeare, to the primal works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Not yet regal of bearing, she has, nonetheless, thrown down the gauntlet, challenging the great classical actresses of our time with her staggering combination of intensity, intimacy, and emotional commitment, all expressed with a banana-smeared face and only the rudiments of language.

For Hallie will speak in only the simplest of sentences.  Stubbornly refusing to use three words when one will do, she has expanded this approach into her own unique and rapidly developing oeuvre through which she proves, with each and every performance, that words are merely an adornment to great acting, a crutch for those who lack her artistic rigor and wide open heart.

Suddenly quiet, something shifts, and Hallie enters a different world. The intensity is still there, but it’s combined with a wry sense of amusement, a fatality which, in one so young, is both disturbing and mesmerizing. Could she possibly be…? Yes! She has moved on to Baby John, the youngest Jet in West Side Story! What am I witnessing here? Is she performing in back to back productions? Or has she interpolated the two plays, creating an extraordinary mash-up through which, with her loudly erratic personal rhythm and no sense of pitch whatsoever, she can deconstruct the American musical in a manner that challenges the very boundaries of theatrical convention?

The food arrives and Hallie settles in, glancing across to the mirror and smiling to herself as she begins to eat her scrambled eggs.  Fully aware of the ground she has broken and the ambitious heights she has yet to scale, she is an innovator to her toes, and I fear for the resistance she will meet. Luckily, though, our daughter is fearless, and cares nothing for the critics. Performing only for herself, she alone knows the perfection she pursues.

The rest of us are just lucky to catch a glimpse.

Hallie zoo

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To Play in the Rain

26 Jul

This gift will last forever, This gift will never let you down… 

  –-Glen Hansard

Last night, at bedtime, I could feel the pull of the night air.  I stepped out onto the porch and looked out across the sky. Pale blue with hints of pink, and thin gentle clouds that rose into small,  fairy-tale mountains as I turned to the north.  A breeze on the warm side of cool brushed past the leaves as Hallie followed me out. “Wow,” she said, looking up at the sky, her hair dancing across her face.

Crawling out of the water that morning, rivulets coursing down my body, I rolled onto the catch basin, too tired to lift myself completely out of the pool.  Slowly standing,  breathing hard as drops of water hit the cement, I slowly made my way across the pavement and up the stairs to my t-shirt and towel, every movement intensely felt in my tired muscles, happy now only to walk, after swimming so far.  Is this, perhaps, why we left the oceans behind us? The sheer pleasure of moving in a different way?

The summer’s been lean.  After a couple years of abundant money and too little time, I’ve had to learn again how to live with the opposite.  And for the first time in ages I feel as if I’m having a summer.  My life is made of wind and water, heat and rain.  The sun rises and sets before my eyes, and as the days grow shorter, I am happy to sit on the porch with my little girl and say wow to the sky.

Swimming, biking, and eating ice cream; childhood pleasures that have always cheered me.  But this summer I long to add another.

I want to play in the rain.

I want to dance in puddles with my daughter, chase kayaking leaves with my son, and laugh with my wife as we both get soaked to the skin.  It’s been a while, and I’m sure I’ll look crazy.  But that’s okay.  Embarrassment holds little sway in my life these days, it’s just another enemy of joy.  And joy is what I’m after.  It is, of course, all around me:  in the motion of my body and in the air that I breathe,  in the clouds in the sky and the laugh of a friend, in the attention of my son, the touch of my wife,  and always, always, always in the eyes of my daughter, where the world never fails to inspire, befriend and renew; and where love abides for all she beholds.

 

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Listening to the Rain

20 May

We sat on the back steps and watched the lightning play across the sky.  Tim was with us for a time, but then he went inside, leaving Heath and I alone, counting the seconds between lightning and thunder.

Heath has always  feared storms, demanding that blinds be closed at the lightning’s first flash, and burying himself beneath pillows when the thunder begins to roll.  But tonight I had a hunch.

“Heath, do you want to come watch the storm with us? ”

“No!” came the reply, muffled beneath the sofa cushions.

I let it go, stepping out into the darkness, only to return a few minutes later.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come outside?  It’s perfectly safe.  The storm is still miles away and we’ll come inside if it gets too close.”

“Really?” he asked doubtfully, peeking from beneath his shelter.

“Oh, yeah” his Uncle Tim replied. “I’m gonna come inside before I get rained on.”

And suddenly, surprisingly, he was at my side, a boy-sized bundle of curiousity and trust.  He stayed close as we walked out onto the back deck.

As a child, I would snuggle down as storms blew in off Lake Michigan and the freshwater wind whipped the sheer cotton curtains over my little double bed.  The thunder would crack, impossibly loud, and my heart would jump as I clenched my eyes shut; relaxing again only as I listened to the waves roaring in the distance, imagining them creeping across the sand, and up to our very door. 

A tornado once dropped a car into my grandparents’ front yard, it’s panicked driver bolting through their living room and into their basement, passing on the way my grandfather, calmly watching his beloved Detroit Tigers.  

And I remember the Fourth of July when lightning mingled with the fireworks.  Later that night the sirens sounded and we made our way to the basement with our pillows, blankets and portable radio, waiting sleepily until the storms had passed.  Mom was up early the next morning to visit dad in the hospital.  He was coming home in a few days.

We watched the dark clouds move in from the southwest.  I had told Heath that that if he counted the time between the lightning and thunder, he’d know how far off the storm was.  He loved this, and clung to the knowledge fervently, insisting that I begin to count out loud whenever the lightning crackled, and then nodding sagely when he heard the thunder.

“The center of the storm is four miles away.” he’d say.

“That’s right,” I said. And then we’d wait to start again.

My mom didn’t find my dad that morning.  She walked into an empty room.  He had died during the night.  While we were huddled in the basement, listening to the radio, and waiting for the world to calm, he had pulled aside his covers, gently stood up, and made his way to the window.  

“The center of the storm is nine miles away!”

“Your right. It’s moving away from us now.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, the numbers are getting bigger, that means the storm is getting further away.”

I see him so clearly sometimes.

“Is there going to be any more thunder?”

“Just rumbles.  Nothing to worry about.”

Standing by that window, seeing his reflection in the darkness, and then looking beyond it. 

“You were so brave, Heath.”

“Yeah.”

Watching the storm, missing his family, and listening to the rain.

 

 

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Following Hallie

12 May


Hallie’s walking now, and as I follow her through her days, I can’t help but wonder what’s going on in her head. 

For though her development is obvious, it is also, due to her Down Syndrome, both skewed, and mysterious.

You see, I’m not a book reader when it comes to my kids.  Some part of my soul quietly dug in its heels early on, and I’ve been resisting the experts ever since.   The downside of this is that I spend a lot of time learning things the hardest possible way.  The upside is that my instincts are my own.

So, of course, I could study up and nail down the developmental mileposts Hallie is likely to hit, and as far as her physical development goes, we’ve pretty much done that.  But the growth of her inner world  leads down a more tenuous path, and rather than burying my head in someone else’s map and fretting over every missed turn, I prefer to let my daughter lead.

Her ways are not direct.

After building herself up early on to a solid 15 word vocabulary, she more recently seemed to reach a dead end.  Undaunted, she did what any sensible explorer would do: she turned around and headed back the way she came.  And so we watched much of her early knowledge dissipate over the past year until we were back to “Da-da “, “Ma-ma”, “Up” and “Done.”  She even stopped saying Heath, for the longest time her favorite word.

But lately she seems to have found a new path, one that has taught her to walk, to sing, and to discover the word “Yeah.”  At this moment in time, this one syllable is her true medium.  Although her intonation is  limited, “Yeah” functions as more than just a sound she can repeat.  She uses it to answer questions.  She uses it for emphasis.  She uses it appropriately.  She uses it.  And for the first time, it feels like language.

I enjoy being lost, which is a gift.  For this is how we travel.  Up in the morning, diaper change and breakfast.  And then Hallie begins her journey.  I follow as she ambles along, her lurching gate growing in ease and strength with each passing day.  Despite her continued negotiations with gravity, she moves forward with joy and determination, smiling upon her world and brooking no obstruction.  She turns back only to make sure I’m still with her, and then, purpose renewed, she heads deeper into the beguiling labyrinth through which she is my only guide.

Hallie Easter 2011

 
 

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Crossing 9th Street

23 Feb

The air was cold when I stepped outside, but the sun was up, slowly revealing the quiet morning streets. 

I’m not good in the dark.  My vision’s not great, and the farthest reach of my run, south of the park, is a little sketchy.  So the light is welcome, and it combines with my new fleece hat to make the calm, seventeen degree air tolerable.  Stepping over a mound of crusted snow into the dry street, I start the timer on my watch, and slowly begin to lope, giving my stiff calves a chance to warm up as I head toward the corner.

Hallie’s white cell count is low.  Her pediatrician had us wait a month.  We redid the test.  Still low.  Children with Down’s Syndrome have an increased incidence of leukemia.  She has none of the symptoms and her pediatrician says it is not an immediate concern.  We have an appointment with a hematologist in a couple weeks.  Steps are being taken.  There is no need to worry.  Nevertheless, her white cell count is low.

The first stretch of the run down Ditmars Boulevard is the most tedious.  Narrow sidewalks, few businesses, no trees.  That’s the reason I head this way.  I like to do the hard part first.  I’ve been trying to teach this to Heath, but he’ll have none of it.  He much prefers to kick his troubles down the road.  I understand this, I used to be the same way.  But it’s so much better to save the best for last.  This hard won wisdom does nothing more than bounce off the wall that is my son.  But I keep trying.  Repetition is my friend.  That’s what  I tell myself.

I was hoping for a red sunrise, that rare gift of cold winter dawns.  A couple times a year I’ll catch one of these; the sanguine light silhouetting the trees and houses above the park.  But today was not my day.  Turning away, I followed the icy path down toward the East River.

The path had been clear the night before, but this morning small drifts, a few inches  deep, covered the asphalt.  I bounced through them, hare-like, moving quickly to keep the snow out of my shoes.  Fully warmed, the running came easy now, and, despite my lack of exercise over the past weeks, I moved through the shadow of the bridge with a grace I had not earned. 

Hallie was up late last night, climbing repeatedly out of our bed, scooting into the living room, planting herself in front of the T.V. and complaining loudly for more Elmo.  I awoke to find her there, having worn her mother out, all quiet innocence as it approached midnight.  I scooped her up and took her into bed, where  I turned off the lights and laid her on my chest.  She was still for a moment, but then lifted her head and tried once again to climb down. 

“No,” I said, pulling her back, “You need to sleep.” 

She rested for a moment, and then rolled over into the crook of my arm.  I pulled her close and began, softly, to sing.  Slowly, she relaxed, rolling onto her side.  I rolled too, gently patting her bottom in time to the song.  We watched each other.  Her eyes began to flutter, then close, and soon she was asleep.

I crossed 9th street, stepped up onto the sidewalk and turned left, running south along the river.  A battered DEP ship was riding low as it made it’s way upstream, and I thought, “That would be a good life, sitting inside a warm cabin, drinking coffee on a cold winter morning.”  Beyond I could see Manhattan, it’s buildings just beginning to warm. 

When life overwhelms me, my focus narrows.  It’s imperceptible at first, but then it dawns on me, as I hunch my way through the day, that I am seeing little more than pavement, feet, and whatever is going on inside my head.  Running is the antidote.  The cold air in my face, the deep, chest-expanding breaths, the alertness needed to move quickly through a slippery world; all combine until suddenly I can see it all: sun, water, and sky; the whole gorgeous 360 degree panorama that is my world.

At some point during the night Amy moved Hallie to her crib.  Shortly thereafter she was replaced by her brother, who, god love him, seems to be nothing but elbows and knees and is about as easy to cuddle as a cinder block.  So when 5:30 rolled around, it was remarkably easy to get up, put on my running clothes, and step out into the cold.  

I know where I’m going when I run; the route is set.  Thirty minutes takes me through varied terrain and at the end of that time a journey has been made.  It is both well defined and wholly unpredictable.  I never regret it.  And it always brings me home.

 

 

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The New Normal

23 Dec

It’s been an odd week. 

Stumbling into Monday morning, I attempted to prop myself up with what turned out to be the highly volatile combination of yerba mate and Grooveshark.  As a result, I spent much of the next two days ecstatic over the recent recordings of Glen Campbell. 

Heath, who, for those of you playing along at home, has now been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome (begging the question, does one family really need to be this special?  Can we not spread it around a bit?), has been charming the pants off the various and sundry psychologists, counselors, and therapists who’ve been mentally poking and prodding him over the last several weeks.  Which is saying something for a school-hating six-year-old famous for both the volume and frequency of his meltdowns, and who, when asked by his teacher to write down his homework, recently told her to “stir it with her nose.” 

But with his diagnosis has come an unexpected outpouring of support, especially from his school.  And as with Hallie’s birth, I am reminded that we are not alone, and that any walls between myself and the larger community are largely self-built. 

And speaking of Hallie, she took her first steps!  Two wobbly lunging steps from her therapist’s arms to mine, grinning from ear to ear the whole time.  A year and a half after most children walk, and a good six months after those with Down syndrome, she is, as always, happily doing things in her own time, and redefining “normal” for us all.  I believe she see’s this as her job. 

As for Amy, we don’t see much of each other these days.  Any time we have is filtered through the needs of these two raucous beings who have hijacked our lives.  But she is good at Christmas, and preparations are afoot.  Hopefully, sometime soon, we’ll find some time alone.  That would be the best present of all.

So deck the hall’s, roast some chestnuts, jingle your bells, and hark those herald angels.  

And if you get a chance, check out the most recent Glen Campbell album.  It is awesome!

 

 

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